I’m a month into my Apprenticeship program at Quick Left, so I figured I’d share what I’ve been up to in the last 4 weeks.

Before I begin, it should be noted that I’ve been learning web development on my own for about a year now, so I didn’t come into this program as a complete noob. However, having access to a structured curriculum and brilliant, energetic mentors has made a HUGE difference in the quality and progress of my learning. There is a great mix of rigid curriculum mixed with weekly challenges that have made the last month incredibly fun; it’s strange to think that I consider going to work as the fun part of the day and dread coming home to my girlfriend’s lunatic cat the most.

The Apprenticeship program is composed of individual segments of knowledge. The first month was a general overview of everything web development, broken out into 4 parts: environment setup, Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS, and Javascript. The idea behind this structure is that even though you won’t have a deep understanding of any of these topics after the first month, you will have created ‘buckets’ to serve as places to store new information that might otherwise have gone in one ear and out the other due to a complete lack of knowledge on a subject.

This week marked the beginning of month 2, which means that for the next two months I will be focusing solely on Rails. I have done some heavy, heavy reading on database design and am looking forward to putting it to use.

Although I find the Apprenticeship to be a blast, this isn’t to say it is a breeze. During the day at work, I spend all of my time going through the study topics for that week and completing the coding tasks that are assigned to me. Then when I get home, I spend an average of 2-3 hours reading various related articles and things I had bookmarked during the day. It’s not likely that I’ll ever have access to the minds of some of the industry’s best, in a learning environment, for six straight months again, so I spend as much time as I can studying up. This is what makes the Apprenticeship program so incredible - everyone puts their maximum effort in, so of course something amazing will come out of it.

That’s it for now, I’m headed off to dive deep into Rails. But I’ll be posting more updates soon, so check back to see my progress. You can also come find me or Bing (our other apprentice) at one of our Hackfests and we’d be happy to give you the inside scoop on what we’re working on.

Photo courtesy of: YoVenice